Learning Building from Scratch (Development)
I know there are quite a few posts on online courses for real estate. I haven't seen many focused on development and am wondering if anyone has any recommendations on which ones I should pursue.
I’m hoping to learn about the entire process from start to finish. Permits, zoning, financing, loans, ownership, disposition, etc.
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I'd like to find materials for the same but haven't found anything useful. Would love to hear if anyone has good resources, including a construction for dummies type resource.
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Not an online course but someone who is experienced in the field recommended this book to me. I bought but have not read it yet. Hope it helps
https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Building-Conception-Delivery/dp/0578553651
If the link doesn’t work, the book is called The Birth of a Building by Ben Stevens.
The finance part is the part that's most easily learned in a course setting. Not that there aren't elements of finance that you only learn by doing, but you can definitely learn a lot in classes.
Construction, though, is a tough thing to learn in a class. You really need to be around it to learn it. Even many of the other aspects of development involved detailed thinking about construction. You hire architects and engineers essentially to create the instruction manual for the contractor. Permitting involves detailed analysis of especially site design (the municipal peer review process often requires even more site detail than the actual site contractor requires).
Similar to the above reply^ but also, it will be hard to find all of that knowledge in one course nicely wrapped up. You kind of start putting pieces together after being in/around/interested in development & its processes over time. A good way to start and (similar to what I did in college) would be to create google docs individually titled; Permits, zoning, financing, loans, ownership, disposition.
Then go through and find resources specific to each category - videos, podcasts, textbooks, YouTube. Try and make your own "course". Spend a month researching each category, reaching out to people in the industry, teachers or anyone.
I've done ACRE, REFM and a few other less known courses. I think the best use case for those is the granular, more focused Excel knowledge. Also, they are very pricey.
There is plenty great quality content out there for free that can be as structured, you just need to make a structure rather than purchase one.
Following on this comment, I think a well-structured book or guide to development, soup to nuts, would sell very well. I haven't seen much like this.
Tough to learn from books - there isn’t really anything great that I’m aware of which covers soup to nuts.
The challenging part of development, is that it’s all very nuanced - regional building constraints (soils, systemic zones, storm mitigation, land tract sizes) municipalities (zoning, local approval processes, tribal knowledge of people in local government), and knowing the right people (architects engineerings, contractors, attorneys etc.) and how to get there best work, are really complicated things that take years of doing to learn.
You can get some decent textbooks on construction means and methods which are actually very helpful in at least defining the terms. The rest really needs to be learned through on the job training/experience.
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